From: JASA 33(June 1981): 74-81.This article is in the main an updated revision of the text of an address
given to the 25th Annual Convention of the American Scientific Affiliation
held at Bethel College, Minnesota, in August, 1970.

Now is a good time for scientists who profess that their
life-consciousness is gripped by the Good News for modern
man to exhibit a conception of the human creature that is
really new instead of just a reshuffling of old ideas, replete
with pagan dilemmas and dead ends. By "new" I mean a
conception of man and woman that rings an exciting bell of
blessings for theoretical analysis and professional praxis
rather than frustrations: a conception that straightens us
out, the psalmists would say, and affords a prophetic integration of how we do things in the laboratory, at home, in
our hobby, as student, citizen or whatever. We need to
have the presence of the Lord biblically embedded in our
understanding of humanity, or we have sold out on our
Christian birthright, no matter how often we import God
into the environs of human nature afterwards.

With these foolish, brave words I mean to say that committed evangelicals who have grit to their faith would do
well to shuck the age-old belief in body and mind, or the
formulation that says body, soul and spirit is the composition of man. To think that a human is an embodied soul, or
an animated corpse, or a rational animal with a heavenbound spirit, or some other stock combination of a soul
and a body, frustrates scientific analysis of man; it is contrary to experienced fact, and is unsupported by the scriptural givens. Many secular scholars, dissatisfied with the
honky-tonk, commercialistic exploitation of men and
women in our society, predicated on a materialist design,
are also looking for some new thing on the nature of man
today. Maybe we can help them if we truly do have a new,
that is, a biblically fresh vision.

Psychosomatic Effects and Christian Theology

Everybody knows, of course, that so-called psychosomatic disorders have been a reality long before the invisible industrial management strain, or before the invisible
university professorial and administrative tensions produced visible ulcers that can be cut and bleed. But trying to
analyze psychosomatic troubles with the neat, theological
categories of body, soul and mind, inherited from Plato
does not work well. Even a faculty psychology, pendent
from the Aristotelian-Galenic view of man as having a
vegetative soul, sensitive soul, and superimposed rational
soul giving distinctive form to the material body, is inadequate, like trying to engineer a space shot with Ptolemaic
astronomy.

Recognition of the reality of subconscious processes in
human makeup has also demonstrated how artificial and
scientifically impotent the traditional, church-sanctioned,
dichotomistic anthropologies are. And the pressing need
for a reformation of mind or soul-body problematics can
be clearly seen in the quandry of modern psychiatry.
Psychiatry has done everything from boring a hole through
your skull to giving you a soft soapy talk while reclining on
a couch, in its effort to get an analytic, scientific,
therapeutic finger on the desires and pains, ideas and values
swelling through human behavior. Psychiatric methods
have been dangerously blowing in the wind, says zoologist
von Bertalanffy, because the fundamental, a priori
framework with which.modern psychiatry approaches man
is uncertain or askew-something no amount of data
research can make good (The Mind-Body Problem, p. 30).

It is right at this point, I believe, that Christian
philosophy should minister to specialized scientists, but not
with a learned rehearsal of philosophical conceptions of
man from Anaximander to Jean Paul Sartre, nor with a
cavalier dismissal of those twenty-five centuries as a
nightmare of pseudo-problems from which linguistic
analysis shall save us. Needed instead is an encyclopedic
conception of man which gently sacrifices that sacred cow
of "the (substantial) soul" inside man's body without
defacing him into a molecular combination of physique and
biosensitive operations with epiphenomenal values rotating
around like electrons. To study a man as a physical
phenomenon is a gross inhumanity; it is like observing a
water drop form in a man's eye and say "he leaks," instead
of "he cries" (de Boer, p. 10). But what has passed for non-naturalistic, "Christian" reflection on human
nature-whether in its Augustinian, meso-Platonic,
freewill hassle of a man, or in the scholastic, intellectualistic
version canonized by Thomas Aquinas-such reflections on human nature, have been, in my judgment, ersatz
Christian and a stumbling block for down-to-earth Christian
scientific analysis. Our Christian conception of man must
feature the peculiar richness of his God-responsivecreaturehood while accounting for what meets the daily
eye, and not yoke exacting, firsthand examination of man
with other-worldly, dogmatic baggage.

Committed evangelicals who have grit to their faith would do well to shuck
the age-old belief in body and mind, or the formulation that says body, soul and spirit is the composition of
man.

I do not wish to take the time to berate medieval theology
for the fix we Christians are in, but theology that has not
minded its own theological business, deepening our confessional life with insights proper to that facet of our inter
woven existence, has always tyrannized other responsible,
Christian reflection. The Roman curialists learned their
lesson with Galileo and never put Darwin's writings on the
Index, but evangelical theology has by and large not had
the benefit of that historic training. Even today, conservative theological pamphlets flood the market with judgments on the age of the earth that make Christian geologists
squirm. However, all that concerns me now regarding man
and woman is this: it does not make good sense to theorize
backwards from a supposedly known post mortem condition of man (about which Scripture tells us passing little),
extrapolate logically back from existence-after-death to the
now for determining how man must be found constituted.
Such theological dictation is particularly egregious when it
is so uncritical of its conceptual debt to a tradition of Orphic cult, Pythagorean mystique and Plato's
Phaedo,
especially if it misuses the Bible as a text book source
precluding direct investigation. The Scriptures-Calvin
said it right (Institutes: 1, vi, I)-are the glasses through
which, for example, we can look anew at human nature.

A Christian Philosophical Conception of Man

I sketch here what might be the basic elements in a Christian philosophical conception of man. I shall call it the tin
can theory of woman and man.

A leitmotif through my presentation is this, that each
human creature is only one, a whole one. All special scientists-biologists, physicists, psychologists, sociologists,
linguists, economists, ethicists, logicians, aestheticians,
mathematicians, theologians, political scientists-each may
take out his particular microscope to get a bead on a man or
woman, but you may not, like the proverbial blind persons
feeling the elephant, think you have the whole picture when
you have a hold of the trunk or the tail, its leg or the hide.
Scientists must beware of the temptation to parcel a man into pieces even only as a working method, for such a working method really presumes that the human creature is a
synthesis of separate, functional compartments. Because a
man or a woman is one, single, whole creature, it is the
philosophical task to establish an overview, interdependently with findings of the special sciences.

Christian philosophy is not theology in non-ecclesiastic
dress. Christian philosophy is philosophy: a systematic,
synoptic analysis of things which focus on their interrelational meaning. Like every science, philosophy too has a
theoretical character; it abstracts to get at the law-side of
things, i.e., philosophy tries to approximate the structure
of what holds for certain things and their functionings.
Christian philosophy tries to grasp the structural contours
which hold for man, in such a way that the truth of Psalm
8-"you have made him almost like a god"-gets obediently and fruitfully, however fallibly, disclosed in quite earthy terms.

A Basic Philosophical Assumption: Individuality-Structure

A fundamental, cosmological assumption I make is the
thinghood of whatever is extant. Individuality, for me, is
not a guilty philosophical problem until proved innocent;
but the individuality-structured way we are constantly confronted I unquestioningly and happily acknowledge as a
creational given. Our God-ordered universe is a population
of various kinds of concrete, individuality-structured
things-that is how God set it up. To be created means to
be a cosmically ordered, irreducibly different, definite
individual thing, one identifiable and re-identifiable thing
among other comparable entities. Intrinsic to every creature or creational item is an enduring identity which bears a
certain typifying and foundational closure to its singular
configuration, which is established and maintained only by
the fiat of God Almighty.

This confession on individuality-structure will sound to someone raised on Hume like a deus ex machina bow to
convention, unworthy of philosophic tough-mindedness.
But I would persist, because the idea of thinghood not only
explicates an important dimension of what creaturely,
created existence actually means but the philosophical idea
of thinghood also corroborates our ordinary experience
with an antinomy-free simplicity unknown to the old substance-philosophy accounts of individuation and individual
permanence. Sophisticated attempts like that of Russell
who, correctly avoiding substance, tries to explain away
a-piece-of-matter as a string of physical events linked
together-especially when that scientistic shredding of
things is given general application (Russell, pp.
243-248)-always strikes me as some sort of homo ex machina solution, because sooner or later, unless you evasively
beg the question, either Bewusstsein uberhaupt, "a single
unified spatio-temporal system" or some other demythologized god of Humanism rears its head to guarantee what is a daily occurrence and a normal assumption-the individuality-structured thinghood of whatever is
here or there and everywhere around.

More than two decades ago, the noted Oxford scholar P. F. Strawson, in his painstaking study entitled Individuals,
stated clearly that a general philosophical corain Deo
justification intending to solve the "problem of other selfhood minds" is impossible to give; in fact, even the demand for a
solution to the problem cannot be coherently stated (Strawson, p. 112). If he had remained consequent with
that confession, his book would have had a shocking character similar to walking outside the walls of the university in
emperor's clothes. But, while disclaiming any proof
making, Strawson still argues, and argues persuasively, that
material bodies are the indubitable basic particulars and the
concept of person has a primitiveness which simply must be
admitted because our language, the conceptual scheme we
as a matter of fact do have of physical things and other per
sons, calls for it and operates that way (Strawson, pp.
53-58, 110-113). Because Strawson wants to affirm the
reality of individuals whose identity is more than a
numerical or qualitative or monadic type-individual identity, one that can withstand change of place and time
(Strawson, pp. 32-34, 125, 131-134), and yet because he is
unwilling to profess it as a pre-philosophical ssumption,
Strawson courageously (his reticent Kantian back to the
wall, so to speak) goes ahead and "makes a case for it,
with as much pseudonymic distance as possible, in an essay
of descriptive (only "descriptive"! he says) metaphysics.

The predicament of this keen thinker, along with others,
makes very convincing to me the fact that this lasting uninterchangeable identity of one thing or another remains
unapproachable to theoretical analysis. Individuality
structure is a given initially accepted or initially denied by
philosophical theory and subsequent investigation. Our
everyday experience of the macro world attests to its existence, I think, as a basic ordinance of reality-this is what
Strawson is trying to work off of and something the Gestalt
psychologists latched onto-that we normally perceive
things first-off as whole configurations and fairly certainly
recognize in a naive way whether it is the same one, an identical one or a different thing. (The micro particles of
physics need special attention because sub-molecular
physical entities, as largely theoretical constructs, have an identifiability-dependence upon the entire abstractive,
scientized condition and lack the concrete, independent
character of macro things. It is very important right here
not to give scientific experimence, if I may coin a word,
primacy over ordinary experience as to which points to the
primary order of created reality). But the fact that we normally aprehend macro objects as identifiable wholes does
not prove an individuality-structured setup to a skeptic who'
simply disbelieves it, anymore than the fact that we see the
sun disappear and that it is the evening and morning of a
new day witnesses to the secularist that our Lord is the
faithful Creator.

Many more observations and qualifications must be
made, of course, about "things." A blade of grass or the

wind, a crow or my neighbor is never known disconnectedly
as a completely separate, singular entity. But every thing is
always like a thread on the loom whose warp and woof of
quantity, extension, gravitational forces, energy, growth,
sensibility, formativity, style, significance, conceptualization, use, and still more features as properties or latent
qualities, totally enmesh the thing. Individual things also
only exist as members of a kind; it is one of the plants or
animals (despite the invisible crossover line), the inanimate
physico-chemical kingdom, the human race, or angel creatures. Everybody knows that each thing within animalkind,
for example, falls into a subgrouping dependent upon a
common genetic or internal morphological structuration.
Further, most macro things, despite their integral simplicity, have other individualities complexly interwoven within
their wholeness, like the heart, lungs and stomach, for example, of a squirrel. But the original, whole thing is more
than the sum of its internal organs, skin and nervous
system, for their subordinated role is defined by the thing's
singular configuration. Ordinary experience, it seems to
me, bears that out again: a squirrel that has just been shot is
not conceived of as a ruptured brain, collapsed lungs, stilled heart with four feet and punctured fur, but is taken to be
a whole, dying squirrel. To notice, accept, and assume the
enduring oneness of individuality-structuration does not
mean you think every thing is blankly simple.

So the fundamental, cosmological assumption I makewhich is the cornerstone for my tin-can theory of woman
and man-is that individuality-structure is an ontic given
holding for creation. The multiple functions of an individual thing are indeed present and can be differentiated,
and the whole complex, integral, concrete thing is certainly
open to development, deterioration and proliferation; but
the identifiable, single prime which undergoes all such
change and eludes theoretical determination is simply a
structural creational given. Every attempt to locate that irrefragable oneness of a thing in some mysterious, hidden
focus as a tension of functions (as monism does) or to pinpoint it as the relation of parts (as dualism does-as if a
relation could be prime!) is going to lose the configured
wholeness of a blade of grass, the planet or a squirrel. And
then you have lost a lot. Because that leading idea of
individuality-structure catches most perceptively the import
of the biblically revealed truth of creation in that the very
singularity of the thing, as well as its whole relative, temporal existence, is utterly and thoroughly dependent upon
the creative-sustaining Logos of God who cares for it
directly, whether it be sparrow, hair on your head, fily of
the valley, or zygote.

The Skeleton of a Christian Philosophical Anthropology

Few people on the street deny thing-character to
subhuman existents, that a rock, tree or an animal is of one
piece. But it is with woman and man that especially Christians on the street have balked. There seems to be more to
woman and man than meets the eye, and the "more" to
humans is usually thought to be more than something like
the back side of a box in one's visual field. There is
something special, different, "spiritual" in the human
creature.

I should like to disarm the man on the street or the
woman in the home with the fact that woman or man is a
creature, and as creature woman or man is a temporal,
identifiable, individuality-structured thing. A human
creature is also of a piece, whose single existence manifests
itself in all sorts of ways-a man is so big, with such a
shape, moves, has weighted mass, breathes, feels, forms,
can play imaginatively, talks, thinks, socializes, saves
possessions and spends them, fights, loves, prays-all these
ways of concrete existence, which constitute the man's corporeality, are all manifestations of the one same, individual
subject. A woman or man is a single, full-bodied, tin-can
functioning unit, a prime individual thing grounded with
physico-organic functionings and qualified by selfhood.
Every constitutive factor of this configuration, including its
bloody-fleshly base, is human only as and because of the integrally constituted, inseparably bound-together nature of
the whole self-dimensional structure.

The normal features, as well as the selfhooded peculiarity, deserve emphasis. Man has a this-one nature and an unbroken fabric of concrete corporeal existence simply by being a created individuality-structured creature.

Again, the unrepeatable singularity of a given man cannot be scientifically established. Characterological studies
may pinpoint persistent act-features; handwriting experts
(presumably) identify a definite and recurring temperament; autobiographies get written, and good old fingerprints seem to approach documenting that woman and man
exists one for one, an unquestionably individual creation.
But at rock bottom you have to believe that the fellow who
has put on twenty pounds, divorced his wife, gotten false
teeth and learned Swahili ten years later, is still the same
person. Actually the impenetrable mystery of the gift of individuality is guaranteed surely and only by biblical revelation-even beyond the eschaton (cf. I Corinthians 15:38).

As to the seamless unity of a woman or man's manysided activity, much could be said. One crucial matter is
this, that a human's energy, metabolic processes, desires,
ability to control things, attempts to imagine things, communicate verbally, think, and other distinct functions are
not to be understood as "faculties," some sort of autonomous powers which she or he has corralled and tries to
keep in subjugated order. No, all the discernible ways
humans can act are the very defining, cosmic, operating
order of reality which each then as an individualitystructured entity enjoys. These ways of being-there in
God's world which a woman or man bodies forth are facets
of God's ordinances for all kinds of things, their existential
reality. And the full-bodying tin-can human breathes, feels,
opens a door, thinks, and does all the rest, not as if these
were ontologically separate compartments one "participates" in; but all the many mutually irreducible ways in
which a woman or man functions are interpenetrating,
intra-related moments of his or her concrete existence. For
example, there is power not only in a fist action but also
reverberating within a man's desires and speech and loyalties. While a woman's feelings are not her thinkings, there
is always emotional content inside thought, and there is a
creational pressure to have emotions thoughtful. There are
analogies of vitality in activity beyond one's muscles, in a
woman or man's conversation, occupational routines or
church life. And there are elements of economy anticipated
in one's physical acts, aesthetic response, and social rela
tions.

Calvin Seerveld comes from West Sayville, New York. He studied, at Calvin College (B.A.
1952) and the University of Michigan (M.A. 1953), the Free University of Amsterdam
(Ph.D. 1958), and various European universities (Basel, Rome, Heidelberg, London).
His teaching responsibilities have been largely in philosophy (Belhaven College,
Mississippi, 1958-59; Trinity Christian College, Illinois, 1959-72). Since 1972 he has held
the chair of Phil9sophical Aesthetics at the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto. His
publications include
A Christian Critique of Art and Literature (1963), The Greatest
Song in Critique of Solomon (1967), A Turnabout in Aesthetics to Understanding (1974)
and Rainbows for the Fallen World: Aesthetic Life and Artistic Task (1980).

In fact, this tin-can solid, this cohering pattern of
ordered, enduring activities is the proper meaning of corporeality.

That is an important point, because centuries of Western
intellectualism have reduced the conception of corporeal
and body to the cussed abstraction of "matter," to what is
hard, intractible, this physical hulk about us, and pointedly
disparaged it as animal baggage, but much too real for
comfort. And that web of misconceptions has played havoc
with our reflection on the human creature's created glory
and over-all cohering reality. Any concrete durable act of
man, I would maintain, is bodily expression-human
speech, insinuation, penetrating reflection, are all corporeal acts. Words and thoughts kill as surely as rocks and
bullets; a brick wall indeed stops a truck, but I have seen
parental emotional upbringing stop a twenty year old more
permanently in his tracks than any brick wall. Nicodemian
scientists must learn that while poisons can end a man's
breathing and brain waves, certain secular ideas can finish
off a woman or man completely for good, as the New Testament puts it, when the Lord punishes him or her both
"body and soul" in hell (Matthew 10:28). That is, the
whole gamut of man's concrete action should be designated
corporeal. The functioning tin-can man is a body. A
woman or man is not incarnate, as if like Christ once was
not yet human there is a human substance possibly not yet
fleshed out concretely. If man be incarnate, where does the
"carnage" begin? with his speech? craft ability? feelings?
or only physique? Where does a woman or man's "body"
stop and start? Is the promise of a love-act or sentencing
one to jail, so that the other winces or knows joy, less corporeal, less bodily an action than bleeding or falling down a
flight of stairs?

Do not misunderstand me. Because angels are as real as
cement I am not saying prayers are like digestion and
toothaches are mental. Only this: the whole blanket of activities, all the ways a man is in concrete action is him or her
bodily, coporeally there. And there are no second class
citizens in kinds of human activity. There is, to be sure, an
order of conditioning: organic health gives psychic life
stability in the clutch; good psychic integration certainly
strengthens analytic development, and if psychic life is
disturbed, it quickly shows up in malfunctioning social intercourse and frequently blocks confessional activity; a
measure of technical competence is prerequisite for all
forms of art, language, science, and societal leadership.
And discovering the interlocking order and dynamic of support and enrichment among the complicated ways a woman
or man functions has important implications for education.
Physico-organic functioning also has special foundational
character; it is the life-breath base of a woman or man that
God gives and God takes away. As underpinnings, then,
such bio-physical, bloody-fleshly functioning grounds the
other activities, not as some "primary stuff" they shape
and direct, nor as a set of neurophysical processes that
maintain an isomorphic correspondence with the more cultural workings, but just as the founding, undergirding element needed, given by God, cohering in structuration with
selfhood, to constitute a living, human individualitystructured creature. Man is not an animated corpse
anymore than he is an embodied spirit: woman or man is a
selfhooded thing with physico-organic base.

(Once God pulls that physico-organic rug out from underneath you, so to speak, your natural given time is up and
that human one goes to be with the Lord or to hell, says
Scripture. The left-overs or remains in this aeon are not
human, not part or piece of a woman or man; although the
remains are often the object of human devotion and
distinguishable for a time from a carcass, the remains of an
animal, relatively soon the corpse shows it is but dust left.)

Each human creature is only one, a
whole one.

What makes this whole creaturely thing a human
individuality-structured existent, what makes us people
men and women rather than male and female animals, is
this: we are built selfhoodedly open, and ready to be receivers of God's Word. Men and women are religious creatures: individuality-structured entities called to act out the
self-conscious (communal-conscious) office of being coram
Deo, serving lords of the universe. Peculiar to a woman or
man's existence is that the whole richly concrete corporeality a human is has a thrusted bent to it. That man's existence
is thrusted, innerly focused and intrinsically referential of
all one does and means toward the true or some pretended
Absolute Origin: that is woman or man's being in the image
of God. All human's bear God's image. The worshipping dependent, structural peculiarity of human creatures remains intact and is not annihilated by sin. Unbelievers
betray the imago
Dei
by their restlessness, which leads to
their distraction and eventual damnation. Manly and
womanly believers, sinning saints, witness to their thrusted
nature, glory in it, as they reflect and reveal God's ordinances.

The crux of my position is that the selfhood, the concentrated heart-specialness of a woman or man is not a separable from the body, the human's concrete functioning,
nor is selfhood independent from being the lever-windowfocal point of woman or man moved by sarx or the Holy
Spirit. Selfhood or "heart" or "soul" is the unconscious
structural opening-gateway thrust of man's inescapable
relation to God under the Word-command, "Love me
above all, praise!" This is why I use the tin-can metaphor
to describe woman or man. What defines man is not an entity inside man but is the structured thrust of the whole, as
invisible yet as all-determining and as inseparable as the
axis of a cylinder. A tin can (cylinder) also has the graphic,
humbling connotations that may stop us women and men
from thinking more highly of ourselves, as earthen vessels,
than we ought to think.

It is the strucural before-God position that provides a
sense-of-self to human activity, i.e., a sense of a concentration point below consciousness which makes all one's
operation personal. Man acts personally, intentionally-toward
things in reality and realizes such intention by active deed.
Such built in, reflexive act-character adds the dimension of
shame to man's life-animals do not blush and are never
naked-so that this monitoring t&e-d-t&e reservoir of
silence in one's own preconsciousness (conscience=knowing with) is an important and delicate
feature coloring all human doings. This inner room for embarrassment can be a hidden check to avoid what ruins
one's self. This selfhooded preconscious depth is also able
to be corrupted by false guilt-feelings or secularly defaced
and leveled out so it is virtually inoperative, defacing the
three-dimensional richness of human existence into a onedimensional creature easily programmed for direct reactions to stimuli. But this creational sense-of-self in women
and men is one important reason why human sexual relations can never be animalistic: they can be debased,
wedlocked, full of joy or orgiastic, but they are always
human.

Mankind in Community

Integrally interwoven with the self-act-structure of man
is one's being a fellow-creature.
Mitsdin,
a being bound
together with other selves in society, neighborhooded, is
what characterizes mankind alone. This non-genetic, interpersonal bond of communal consciousness is a given for
every member of the human race because by its very creaturely specialness every human creature stands directly
under the same central command of "Love God above all
and your neighbor as yourself." Men and women who still
exist in the first Adam experience this innate, neighborhooded given as a societal burden or make of it a distorted
ideal: those who live in the second Adam accept it gratefully as a task within which we are called to be patient and
gracious good Samaritans.

What defines man is not an entity inside man but is the structured thrust
of the whole, as invisible yet as alldetermining and as inseparable as the
axis of a cylinder.

Sin

No understanding of woman or man is biblically Christian and complete without also showing how the reality of
sin fits into the picture. Animals are not sinners, but
individuality-structured humans are. Sin is not an animalbeastial lower roughness in men needing to be rationally
overcome. Sin is also not simply devilish control of human
nature. Since Adam's fall, I believe, sin is a fully congenital
human condition. Sin is not due to our creaturely temporality. It is also not a passing functional state of affairs,
although it shows up functionally. As a sinful religious creature, man is foolishly in proud, idolatrous rebellion
against God. Sin is the whole-hearted, turned-in-upon-itself
direction of religious man (pride) and the rooting of himself
in creation at large or in his own self (idolatry), which is
unlawful ground for ontic rootage, usurping God's prerogative of being the jealous Absolute Origin and
Direction giver for existential human meaning.

Despite ignorance or sincere intentions, if one does not
keep God Almighty's Love-command, that person is breaking it and is therefore ignoring or violating God's central
directive, While sinful, woman or man does not stop being
woman or man, does not lose religious selfhood, does not
lose touch with the world, but he or she does ironically
deprive the self of its ground for being there. This apostate
orientation also threatens the human creature with meaninglessness and the riddle of a disintegrating cosmos, since
the focal point-the God-focused, viceregent calling to
creaturely lordship in Jesus Christ-is lost. Sinful man loses
himself by depending upon and giving total allegiance to
creaturely things or creaturely activity, like science, for example.

One may be saved from this condition in time, through
the work of the Holy Spirit, by being made a member of the
body of Christ which is historically busy, in fear and
trembling joy, to reconcile affairs of the whole world back
to God, keeping the Lord's Word for all reality, since all
creaturely reality was made by him and through him and
for him. The heart of Christians is wholly turned, away
from selfish-centeredness, converted, transplanted and set
in Christ; but the concrete reforming of their bodily acts
take time and often comes on inconsistently wagging its tail
of sanctified feelings, skills, holy imagination, language,
scientific analysis and societal relations behind.

The Whole Person

The fact that such a constellation of philosophical anthropological ideas together recognize the persistent unity
and identity of the whole person defined
coram Deo
in
history on earth is what marks them as biblically Christian.
Traditional philosophical anthropologies have been unbiblical in so far as they misconceived the spirituality (the
structural, to-God's-Word response-ability relatedness)
and corporeality (multi-sorted ways of concrete action) of
the human creature and theoretically abstracted and hypostatized spirituality into a spiritual part (a substantial soul)
and corporeality into a somewhat begrudged, that-too,
material part (a body one has for a while). Such Godneglecting analysis, begun by pagan thinkers who explained
man
per se,
has been largely accommodated rather than
critically reformed by Christian theoretical thinkers; the
synthetic Christian, conceptual result has usually defined
man in se and added a relation of man to God or Jesus
Christ. Secular thinkers by and large define man
pro se,
and then have the problem of what to do with our selves.
But the to-God-relatedness is what defines man, and only
this idea of
coram Deo
structural centering, I think, has the
ontological wherewithal to stop the theory of woman and
man from losing the unity and identity of the human creature
as only one whole woman or man whose total corporeality must be directly obedient to the Lord, rather than letting
him or her be fractured off into pieces where, for example,
one talks about being a Christian
and
an athlete, or a Christian
and
a scientist.

Implied Reorientation for Theory of Knowledge
Let me give one brief hint of the kind of reform a Christian tin-can philosophical anthropology entails, for example, in the theory of knowledge. Every special scientist, as
well as artists and every thoughtful person busy in daily life,
works with a stance on knowledge. Most unchristian
theories of knowledge infecting the cultural air we breathe
assume a dichotornistic anthropology or a reductive one,
and have impoverished and warped our knowledge of
knowledge.

I have presented an idea of woman and man as a selfhooded, flesh-and-bloodily based, individuality-structured
creature operating within all kinds of God's creational. ordinances, a creature who is a sinful, neighborhooded,
religious woman or man belonging to the body of Christ or
who is a card-carrying member of the
civitates mundi
which
is passing away. As historically developing human creatures, we whole humans are aware of other knowable, similarly cosmonornically ordered creatures, whether human,
animal, plant, stone, artefact, or whatever. But most unchristian theories of knowledge assume a different setup
than tin-can communions of humans in touch with other
whole creatures.

The basic outline which unchristian theories of knowledge approximate, in several variants, assumes that there is
a low-down sensing body either mysteriously linked or
tenuously joined with a purely mental, thinking apparatus,
and this localized combination is confronted by a bumpin-to-able world of stuff that can be weighed, measured,
pin-pointed and double checked. In addition to such bump-into-able facts in the world there may also be abstract ideas
called values, which at least some people consider important.

There are many lengthy disputes as to exactly how these
factors jibe to produce valid knowledge. Does (C) or (B) initiate the process? How do (A) and (C) interact? Can (D) be
proved if (A) or (C) is the last court of appeal? But my
point here is that the whole setup is humpty-dumpty awry.
Because of the partitioned human nature and the split
world assumed, knowledge conceived within this unchristian setup has no intrinsic responsibility to be Godobedient, or to be interrelated with other kinds of knowing
acts, or to be aware of its historical datedness. The split
mind/body, thinking-camera model of registering facts and
maybe affirming values has to import history and personal
human responsibility and God-relatedness
afterwards;
it
also neglects kinds of knowing that don't fit these two
sorts, "sensing" and "thinking."

The tin-can vision of woman and man, however, begins
by assuming that our human consciousness of other things
is a self-reflective field of depth-awareness that is simultaneously subjective, multifaceted, variously
normed,

(C) thinking
apparatus
(D) "values"

(A) body
sensors
(B) bump-into-able stuff

Figure 2. An unchristian theory of knowledge.

and called to bring about Christ's rule in history. From the
tin-can perspective human knowing is always full-fledged
bodily human action. That holds for human thinking and
human sensing too-they are intrinsically subjective, relative to moments of guessing, mistaking, pain and even hoping, called to be holy (cf. Philippians 1:9) and called to be
true, that is, called to be full of compassionate wisdom (cf.
John 16:13).a

Even scientific knowing, which is an important, controlled modification of everyday knowing, takes place in
the same setting and is liable to the same basic conditions
and norms, because scientific knowing is also human knowing. The peculiar x-ray problematizing of creaturely things
into fields of specific functions which special scientific
scrutiny effects must be judged not only by the standard of
accuracy but also by the norm of correct relatedness to
other knowledge and to whether the scientific comprehension fills out the Truth itself. A tin-can philosophical anthropology, which will develop its own kind of scientifically
precise knowledge, can be of service to Christian special
scientists and help them find ways to couch their accurate
psychological, biological or physiological points within a
limiting and directing network of knowledge such that the
specialized results give body to Christ's lordship of the
world. If one's special scientific knowledge is not itself
philosophically integrated with an anthropological vision
that is true to our whole, tin-can status directly before God,
no amount of prayer or church attendance or theological
piety afterwards can make it Christian scientific knowledge
acceptable to the Lord.

Conclusion

Medieval Christians usually allegorized nature into an
earthly fact with a correspondingly heavenly meaning. We
evangelical Christians have often pushed the biblical faith we hold into our professional scientific acts in the same
easy, bloodless way. But such an atrabilious approach to
creation-especially if one is treating the human creature
scientifically, trying to fashion a philosophical anthropology-underrates the creaturely object examined
(for creation is revelation!) and overrates the scientific
analyst into a type of God-discerner of meaning (who may
postulate "spiritual truths" on top of "the facts"). If we
could but begin to see woman or man as a tin can for whom
Christ died-Christ did not die to save soul-pieces for a
post-mortem existence-then we can begin to catch the full
meaning of "the resurrection of the body," when the Lord
comes again, and begin to track down the implications of
"sanctification of us bodies" now, reconciling all we bodily
are, including the most professional scientific knowing,
quietly into his service.

aOne of the first projects needing attention in a theory of knowledge working out of the viewpoint of a Christian tin-can, philosophical anthropology
would be making a case for the interdependent existence, validity and
richness of other kinds of human knowing, such as the hunch, or an imaginative grasp of things, or the kind of deliberative weighing of political intangibles we call prudence-all of which are not reducible to either
"sensing" or (pure) "thinking." Cf. my essay on "The Fundamental Importance of imaginativity Within Schooling" in Rainbows
for the Fallen World.